Open Universities and Open Educational Practices

Irwin J Devries

doi:10.19173/irrodl.v20i4.4215

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of how open universities depict their current institutional engagement in open educational practices. In view of the growth of programming for non-traditional students by conventional universities, particularly through online learning and increasing interest in open educational practices, the intention is to gain a better understanding of the unique contributions currently made, or potentially to be made, by open universities in comparison to conventional universities. The study is conducted through a content analysis of open university websites, exploring key themes related to access-oriented open educational practices derived from terms and related concepts in relevant literature. With the growth of distance education, online learning, and other emerging access-oriented open educational practices in traditional higher education, open universities should be uniquely situated to provide visible leadership in these domains. The open university website content analysis explores the extent to which this is the case.

Highlights

Over the past five decades open universities worldwide have emerged, matured, and in some cases morphed from, or evolved into, new structures
The terms selected for searches were “distance education”; “open admission”; “flexible scheduling”; “recognition of prior learning”, “open educational resources (OER) and open textbooks”; “open access publishing”; “research”; and “innovation.” The searches included evidence of any related concepts that would imply the terms selected, wherever they might appear within the website
While open universities have always been strongly characterized by the use of distance education modalities, conventional universities continue to grow their distance education offerings, with the expansion of online learning via learning management systems in place of the still-ubiquitous legacy of print packages in many open universities, a challenge due in no small part to available infrastructure, funding, and expertise

Summary

Introduction

Over the past five decades open universities worldwide have emerged, matured, and in some cases morphed from, or evolved into, new structures. According to a list maintained by Contact North (2018), there are, at the time of this writing, 70 open universities globally; this number will fluctuate somewhat depending on how the count is made and the types of institutions included. The institutions vary from those that were established as fully open universities, to others that were transformed from earlier types of institutions, such as educational television stations. They range in size from student numbers in the thousands to student numbers in the millions. A large majority of open universities are in Asia (Figure 1), with substantially lower numbers in Europe, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania

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